


to enter the circle of dark

by katsumi



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 07:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10917498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsumi/pseuds/katsumi
Summary: A mission brings Cassian and Jyn into contact with the man who made Cassian an orphan. Jyn decides to take matters into her own hands.





	to enter the circle of dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [too_wise_to_woo_peaceably](https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_wise_to_woo_peaceably/gifts).



> First giveaway fic!
> 
> I completely made up character backstory and Star Wars planets because what else is fic for, really.

Draven mentions it in passing, just a single name in a long list of mission instructions. Even after so many years, that name proves to be enough to make Cassian’s vision blur.

“Keysa?” he repeats, voice thick. He sees Jyn shifts in her seat in the cockpit, turning to watch him.

“Yes,” Draven confirms, with a tone that suggests he’s hoping to wrap up this call as soon as possible. “General Keysa is overseeing operations, and he’s brought a full star destroyer’s worth of stormtroopers with him. Your job is to stay out of their way.”

Cassian hesitates. “But—”

“Is there a problem, Captain?”

“No, sir.” His knuckles are clenched white at his side.

He moves further back into the ship after hanging up the commlink, searching for some task to ease the nervous twitching in his hands. He hears a shuffle, and then there’s Jyn—palm light on his forearm, eyes narrowed.

“What is it?” she asks. As soon as he opens his mouth to speak, she’s shaking her head. “Don’t say that it’s nothing. I can tell it’s not nothing.”

His head is foggy, lungs burning, and there was a time when he would have receded into the numbness pooling at the base of his spine and pulled away from her touch. But it’s been years—verging on two, now, since the death star fell—and he’s no longer able to convince himself he wants any space between them. So instead he reaches for her, covering her hand with his own.

“The general overseeing the station on Saliir is someone I’ve met before.”

Jyn’s eyes narrow, like she’s running a calculation through stories he’s told tangled up with her in their bed, like she's searching for figures that might warrant this particular reaction. Her jaw locks, and he knows she has it.

“From Fest.”

It’s not a question—she knows it, can see the truth of it in the hard lines of his shoulders—but he nods anyways. Decades ago, Keysa, then a power-hungry politician with military aspirations, had violently squelched a civil uprising on Fest in order to garner Imperial favor. Cassian’s parents had both died that day—his mother, by Keysa’s own blaster.

It’s a memory he rarely dwells on, or he’d never rid himself of the image of her head craning backwards, the mud-red color of her blood spilling down her neck. It’s a memory he’s only ever shared with one person.

Jyn squeezes his fingers. “He’ll be there?”

“Yes.” And then, because he knows her, knows exactly how to read her frown, he adds: “We’re not supposed to draw attention to ourselves.”

She scoffs.

“Jyn.”

“I know the mission, Cassian,” she snaps. Her eyes glint dark and fierce. “But he’s Imperial, isn’t he? Dangerous. If we could take him out—”

Cassian swipes his tongue across his dry lips; his heart is hammering just thinking about it.

“We have orders,” he says, swallowing. “We stick to them.”

Jyn’s eyes narrow. She lets that statement breathe a moment before answering, a low reminder: “Just because it’s an order doesn’t make it right.”

He knows. Of course he knows. But he’s not been ordered to kill an innocent man this time; instead, he’s to stay away from a guilty one. It feels different. It  _is_ different.

“Our loyalty is to the rebellion,” he says, as firmly as he can. “That comes before vengeance.”

Jyn scowls, but she tightens her grip at the same time, stepping closer into his space. “We could do it.”

There’s something about her barely controlled hatred that spikes warm at his spine. It’s like seeing his own rage reflected back at him, validation of so many years of searing anger manifested in human form. The sight is equal parts comforting and terrifying.

“No,” he says, though it’s a little less firm than before. “We can’t, Jyn.”

She nods. But Cassian doesn’t miss the tick in her cheek, the way her nostrils flare.

He pulls her closer, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and taking a deep, shaky breath. Her fingers hook into his coat, and just for a moment, his spiraling center of gravity seems to realign.

 

* * *

 

The mission on Saliir is simple enough: infiltrate the mining facility, find Cassian’s contact, receive an update on the Empire’s alliance with the Saliirian royal family, and depart without being noticed by the Imperial soldiers. It asks nothing from him he hasn’t done a hundred times before.

Nothing, except stare into the eyes of his parents’ murderer.

It’s a shock when it happens, when he rounds the corner and sees, through the crowd, that pointed chin, those same jowly cheeks. He’d known Keysa was on planet, but planets are large things; the mining facility alone supports thousands of workers. The chances of actually running into him were small.

And yet.

Cassian stops in tracks, staring openly, and for just a second everything is quiet, still. Then Jyn bumps up against his back and the world bursts back to life. He bites his lip, keeps walking.

But the pause was enough. Once they round the corner, Jyn grips his arm and leans in to whisper: “Was that him?”

“We need to get down to level 5,” says Cassian, over the ringing in his ears. “There’s a stairwell at the end of the next hall.”

“It _was_ him.” Jyn glances back over her shoulder. “I knew it.”

“Jyn—”

“I know, I know. Stick to the plan.”

Her hand twitches against her side, right over the blaster tucked beneath her factory-issued vest. Even though he really shouldn’t, he reaches out to grab that hand, clutch it tight in his.

“Exactly. Stick to the plan.”

He starts towards the stairwell before she can argue. (Before he can change his own mind.)

 

* * *

 

They not only find his contact, but manage to secure fifteen uninterrupted minutes in a supply closet for Cassian to speak to him, Jyn standing guard. Everything’s going well, until Cassian steps back out into the hallway to find Jyn nowhere in sight.

Cold fear stabs at his chest, dizzying in its intensity. He doesn’t think about protocol, which would dictate his carefully making his way to the designated rendezvous point. He just runs.

He can’t shout for her, can’t draw attention to herself, even as his mind is screaming her name on a constant, horrifying loop: _Jyn, Jyn, Jyn!_ She’s been taken, snatched from right under his fingers, he was supposed to be there and they _took_ _her_ and—

He rounds a corner, and there she is: perched atop a giant shipping canister near the entrance to the mine, just barely visible from the ground below. Her blaster's cocked, and he doesn’t need to follow her gaze to know at whom she’s aiming.

Breath tight with a mixture of relief and desperate anger, he slinks around past the other workers, climbing the ladder on the side of the canister.

“Jyn,” he whispers, sharp.

She startles, but doesn’t turn around.

“Jyn,” he says again. “We need to go. Now.”

“I can do it. Cassian, I can do it. I have the shot.”

He grips the ladder tight, his fists shaking. “Don’t you dare. Get down here now, Jyn, or I swear—”

A muffled siren blares from somewhere deep in the factory; the people below look about in confusion.

“That’s our cue,” says Cassian, louder now. “We have to go.”

Still, she doesn’t move.

“Jyn.” He’s desperate now, voice hoarse. “Jyn, _please_.”

Finally, she lowers her blaster. Her face is red when she turns back to him, eyes wet. She crawls towards him, and he feels like he can breathe again.

 

* * *

 

He holds it together until they’re back on the ship, until he’s punched in the coordinates and successfully made the jump to hyperspace.

Then he fucking loses it.

“What the hell was that?” he asks, swiveling in his seat. His voice is dangerously close to a shout. “What the hell did you do back there?”

Jyn’s staring out the window, arms crossed in front of her chest. She doesn’t look at him.

“You know what that was.”

“I told you,” he grits out. “I _told_ you not to do it, I told you it wasn’t part of the mission—”

“Screw the mission!” She tilts her neck to face him, teeth bared. “You may put the mission before all else, but that doesn’t mean I have to.”

“So, what, you’re just some vigilante, now? Going to take on every single bad person in the galaxy, just you and your blaster? How do you think that’s going to go?”

“He _murdered your family_ , Cassian!” she yells, sudden and loud.

Cassian stills.

Jyn grits her teeth and says, softer: “I understand that the rebellion comes first for you. So I thought—if you couldn’t do it, I could do it for you.”

Cassian lets those words sink in. Then he’s scrambling forward, reaching for her, leaning across the space between their seats to cup her cheeks in his palms.

“No.” He can barely breathe. “Jyn, no. I never asked you to do that for me.”

“I know that, but—”

“ _No._ ” He closes his eyes, presses his forehead against hers. “Do you know the risk you took today? Do you think, if you had shot him, his army wouldn’t have fired back tenfold?”

“It was a risk worth taking.”

“It wasn’t.” He strokes her cheeks, squeezes his eyes shut even tighter. “Your life is never, ever worth the risk.”

The hate that curdled in his blood had been nothing, _nothing_ next to the weight of his fear when he’d lost her, when he’d realized what she planned to do. He’s lost family once. He cannot do it again.

One of her hands closes over his.

“He deserves to be shot for what he did to your family.”

“Maybe so,” Cassian allows. “But you can’t take that kind of burden for me. Please.”

“I just—” Her voice is small. “I just want you to be okay.”

He almost laughs. “Then don’t do that ever again.”

“It’s not like I was trying to—”

He kisses her, hard, his hands shaking against her cheeks.

“Jyn,” he says, a whisper against her lips. “I love you so much more than I could ever hate him. So, just— _please_.”

Something softens at the corner of her eyes. In an instant she pushes to her feet, crosses the small space between them, and crawls into his lap, burying her nose against his neck. He grips her back, tight, curls his fingers into her hair.

“I thought we talked about how this seat’s only big enough for one person,” he murmurs.

She clutches him tighter. “And yet here we are, both sitting in it.”

“I won’t be able to land the ship like this,” he says, even as he shifts her a little higher to be sure she won’t fall off. “I can’t reach the controls.”

“I’ll get up when we reach Hoth. But for now, I’m going to stay right here. You can deal with it.”

He knows her well enough by now to recognize what she’s really saying.

With a deep, ragged breath, he pulls her closer, lets her skin on his start to numb the burnt-black tension pooling in his chest.

“Okay,” he breathes. “I’ll deal with it.”

**Author's Note:**

> [leralynne](http://leralynne.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


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